In the beginning ...

It was 5:30 in the afternoon, and it was late September, 2010. as I stepped off of the air conditioned plane, I felt like I had just stepped into a sauna. It was 30 degrees centigrade outside, and I was in Israel, at Ben Gurion Airport.

The coach , thankfully was air conditioned, and I was going on a week long tour of the Holy land with my wife.  Mandy. She had been here before, but for me, a kid born in the North of England and raised in north London in a poor area, this was my first venture out of Europe. it was like going into another world. i was stepping back into a place that i was only familiar with via TV , maps and books. And now, here I was, about to visit the places where Abraham , Isaac and Jacob tended their sheep, where King Solomon reigned in splendour and Jesus had walked and talked with His disciples by the sea of Galilee.

Looking out of the coach window, I could see the flat land of the coastal plain. This would have been philistine territory, once, but was now part of the modern state of Israel, and we were on the road to Jerusalem, the capital city - a holy place to 3 of the great religions of the world. for not only was it ruled over by King David and visited by Jesus of Nazareth, but Mohammed, the founder of Islam also came here - and today, on the site of Solomon's temple, there stands the Dome of the Rock, the second most holy place in Islam outside of Mecca itself.

The Israelis had brought irrigation to their farms, and the are was surprisingly green, with olive groves and date palms growing in abundance. we had a guide with our party,  who explained that we were literally going ' up to Jerusalem', for the capital was built on a limestone ridge that formed the central massif of the country. Jerusalem was a few thousand feet above sea level. not only would it be cooler up there, our guide explained, but the high ground caught the warm  , moist winds that came in off the Mediterranean  and cooled them , so that seasonal rains fell on this side of the country. However, when we got to the top, we would see into the 'rain shadow' as it was called. i remembered my geography lessons, in decades previous, where this was explained. The green and pleasant landscape suddenly stopped, and we gasped in amazement at the vast , barren landscape on  the other side of the central ridge.  The bedrock itself was limestone, a relatively soft and permeable rock that easily forms caves as the water soaks in and forms underground streams - and this feature also affected the history of this ancient land, right up to modern times. This is the land where the Bible began.

"But wait",  some may say "didn't the Bible begin with the Garden of Eden, somewhere north of  modern day Iraq? Er, yes, that is where the story was set at first , and then we follow Abraham who left his home town , Ur of the Caldees and trekked down as far as Egypt before moving back up to Canaan, where his son Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob had 12 sons who eventually formed the 12 tribes of Israel. Well, that is the story. But is it true?

In actual fact, I was about to enter on a journey that was the greatest adventure of my life so far-  one that took me from my 21st century life in London  back through to the time of the Patriarchs, and then Jericho where Joshua is supposed to have fought the famous battle, then on to the age of David and Solomon, and eventually to the very places where Jesus spent his time on Earth before He met His death in Jerusalem. And as I went from place to place, a very different picture of Israel's past appeared.

For although the Bible sets out a chronology that takes us by way of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the time of Noah and on to Adam and Eve, there is nothing in the Archaeological record to show that most of these people ever existed. Solomon , the Bible tells us, had all the surrounding  kings and potentates paying him homage and sending him tribute - but not a single entry from any palace ledger from any other place ever mentions Solomon. We have no records of a foreign princess being married off to him, no entries in any archive concerning any items being given in tribute.

It is as though Solomon never existed, and the Hebrews simply made him up, creating a glorious past for themselves with Good King Solomon as a sort of King Arthur figure, presiding over a splendid court in a golden age. Later on , we get the later prophets like Isaiah talking about invading Assyrians laying siege to Jerusalem, and then the story moves on and the Hebrews get taken into exile in Babylon. here , historians and archaeologists are a bit more helpful - they can show us the tunnel that Hezekiah the king had built to supply Jerusalem with a safe supply of water in times of trouble, and we even have a tablet on the wall in the British Museum that Sennacherib, the Assyrian emperor had made that gives us his side of the story. here at last, we find that the Bible and Secular History  are both talking about the same people and the same events.

But earlier on , we see very little of the Bible's grand tale being confirmed by secular sources or archaeological discoveries in Israel. we find mention of peoples like the Hittites and the Philistines - but when we look for signs of the Exodus, or the conquest of Canaan, and even Solomon , we seldom see what the Bible tells us. instead  we see the general outline that John Romer, a prominent archaeologist sets out in his book. it would appear that one small tribe in Canaan split off from the surrounding kingdoms and went independent, they then wrote themselves a splendid history where Yahweh, their god, promised all the land from the Euphrates to the Nile, in return for their obedience to Him .Yahweh took them out of Egypt, sent them into Canaan on a genocidal campaign against the locals, but they merely subjugated most of them instead, and that was the trouble.

Archaeologists have no trouble in spotting a Jewish settlement when they are digging in the ruins. Jewish settlements may turn up pottery, old tools and such - but no pig bones I learned. up and down the land we went over the course of many days. And over and over, it was the same old story.If the Bible said that Joshua conquered the place, the archaeologists would point out that the place appeared to be in pagan hands right up to the time of the Israelite monarchy, and then the people suddenly started eating kosher.the Real story of the Bible begins not in distant Eden, but on that small hilltop that was Josiah's stronghold.

The Law of Moses clearly set Hebrew people apart from their surrounding neighbours. even though the Hebrew religion has strains of Canaanite influence running though it, it was pointing people in a different direction - away from the pantheistic nature worship of the pagans and towards the monotheism of the Priests who ran the Temple.And the biggest lurch in that direction occurred in the reign of  Josiah, when the Temple priests found a lost book and gave it to the king to read.  we will discuss this event in the next entry of this blog. I will attempt to explain why they did this, and what makes me so sure that they faked their own history.

In the beginning...

The Bible starts by taking us back to the time when the world was made. Well, the time that the Author thought the world was made. And then goes on to tell us about Noah and the Flood, about Abraham , Isaac and Jacob, before intoducing us to Moses and telling us the Thrilling tale of how the Children of Israel escaped during the Exodus. And all this information was either written down by Moses, or else he collated the earlier stuff and used it to introduce his own Biography.

Now, no less a renowned scholar that Spinoza stated " It is clearer than the sun at noon  that Moses never wrote the Pentateuch" - the Pentateuch being another name for the Torah. So what actually did happen , back in the Beginning?

It would appear that about 1,000 BC, or thereabouts, a small tribe of Canaanites , living on a small fortified hilltop in Palestine , began to write themselves a history - weaving possible real events that happened in days gone by into a grand and self - congratulatory epic in which they were the chief protagonists and  main beneficiaries of their God, Yahweh.

To be sure, the local people round about, Canaanites like themselves, worshipped a God called El, another called El Elyon, and a whole host of other major and minor deities who were all nature gods of one sort or other. But gradually, these people began taking these gods , with their own myths and stories attached and reworking the stories until they were all about Yahweh. Yahweh was even given their names as His other titles, and became known as El, El Shaddai, and other epithets in His own right.

In Exodus, he tells Moses " I appeared to Abraham as God Almighty , only my name Yahweh, did I not make known to him'. Well, that is interesting, because Yahweh became transliterated into ' Jehovah ' , in the KJV. And there we find that when Abraham went to offer up Isaac  upon Mount  Moriah, and found instead that a ram had been caught in a thicket and he offered up that instead, he renamed that place 'Jehovah-jirah ' - 'Jehovah provides'. Now, why would he do that if he did not know the Divine Name ? Someone has clearly lost the plot!

Indeed, we  find that  God makes Adam before the animals in one version of Genesis, and after the animals in another . That Noah took 2 of every kind of animal into the ark. or was it two of every unclean and seven of every clean animal? And so many stories have 2 different versions of the same event. Curious.

Until a German chap  named Julius Wellhausen pointed out that there were actually 4 different narratives that were woven together as one to make the Torah that we read today. And then another Redactor went to work. These 5 different sources for our  Torah in the Bible may have been lone individuals, or separate ' traditions', and the whole idea of the different narrators became known as the ' Documentary Hypotheses.

Ok, so maybe Moses didn't write the Torah after all - but surely, God made the world , and revealed Himself to the Jews as The One True God- and the Jews had a revealed religion, and not a made up mythology like the rest of the pagans, right from the start... didn't they? Or was it more the case that the Jews were actually Henotheists, and not Monotheists, originally ?

Did they start out thinking that their God was just one of many other gods, but slowly gave Him more and more prominence, until they started declaring that the other gods just didn't really exist at all? Let us be honest , when Yahweh first  meets Abraham , it is always under trees. In many ways, Yahweh is very much like the nature gods of Canaan that He later supplants. When Naomi turns to Ruth , her daughter in law, and points to Ruth's sister, she points out that 'she has returned to her gods and her own people', and urges Ruth to do likewise. No hint of evangelism here. No  'stick with me , kid, for our God is the only one who is real' pitching from Naomi. Oh no. God even sits down in the assembly of the Gods, in one of the Psalms . For the Local Gods met in council in Canaanite myth. And how strange it is that David, the King who wrote all those psalms to his God, should have an idol in his home that his wife could use to throw Saul's men off the scent when they came to kill David. I mean, what are teraphim doing in David's house ? You know what teraphim  are, right ?  The little idols similar to the Lares and Penates of the Romans - household gods  - So why does David own one ?

Clearly, a lot of work was done to paper over the cracks in Israel's past - yet somehow, the hints of the truth still show through. most mysteriously, when Moses is about to go down into Egypt to confront Pharaoh, God wants to kill him, and Zipporah, Moses wife , saves his life by circumcising their sone and touching the feet of the angel with the foreskin , saying ' you are a bridegroom of blood to me'. the fragment of this once great tale is simply found in a few verses that someone tacked into Exodus, where it makes little sense to the modern reader until s/he studies anthropology.

Now, what was all that about? One theory is that circumcision was really a substitute for child sacrifice. it enabled parents to placate the gods by offering up flesh and blood, but still keeping the child alive. It obviously caught on as a better way of doing busines than the full blown burnt offering. But how bizzare that Yahweh wants to go kill Moses on the eve of his entering Egypt to deliver Israel...

If we read carefully, we may even detect that the God Yahweh even had a female consort, who is carefully concealed and yet carelessly alluded to in the Hebrew Scriptures. But that is another story. Let us conclude for now by saying that the bible is not the whole story, but rather the story that an all male priesthood wanted to show the people, and us as well. More detail may be revealed by the translator of texts, the archaeologist , the folklorist and the historian. And we get, not a monotheistic faith revealed by Almighty God, but rather, a people creating monotheism out of the myths and legends  of the people who dwelt round about them, adapting and improving the stories until we get the Bible that we have today. Or at least the Old Testament that we have got now.